Traditional systems management is largely ad-hoc. Application developers do not have a structured framework for managing applications and hardware while achieving high reliability. Systems can include a number of abstract and/or physical resources in the form of software and hardware. However, there is no way to identify a class or category of resources that all have common characteristics. Such a mechanism is important when trying to discover the resources. For example, an administrator may want to learn what kind of information is available about disk drives without needing to know how many drives are actually available on any given computer or the drive names in order to access such information.
What is needed is an improved mechanism for identifying system resources.